Peace Without Justice
By Robert Fisk
The Independent
So, the Palestinians
will end their occupation of Israel. No more will Palestinian tanks smash
their way into Haifa and Tel Aviv. No more will Palestinian F-18s bomb
Israeli population centres. No more will Palestinian Apache helicopters
carry out "targeted killings" - ie: murders - of Israeli military leaders.
The Palestinians have
promised to end all "acts of violence" against Israelis while Israel has
promised to end all "military activity" against Palestinians. So that's
it, then. Peace in our time.
A Martian - even a
well-educated Martian - would have gathered that this was the message,
supposing he dropped in on the fantasy world of Sharm el-Sheikh yesterday.
The Palestinians had been committing "violence", the Israelis carrying out
"innocent" operations. Palestinian "violence" or "terror and violence" -
the latter a more popular phrase since it carried the stigma of 11
September 2001 - was now at an end. Mahmoud Abbas - who told a close
Lebanese friend this year that he wore a suit and tie so that he would
look "different" to Yasser Arafat - went along with all this. Just which
people were occupying the homes of which other people remained a mystery.
Silver-haired and
wisdom-burdened, Mahmoud Abbas looked the part. We had to forget that it
was this same Abbas who wrote the Oslo Accords, who in 1,000 pages failed
to use - even once - the word "occupation", and who talked not of Israeli
"withdrawal" from Palestinian territory, but of "redeployment".
At no point yesterday
did anyone mention occupation. Like sex, "occupation" had to be censored
out of the historical narrative. As usual - as in Oslo - the real issues
were put back to a later date. Refugees, the "right of return", East
Jerusalem as a Palestinian capital: let's deal with them later. Never
before have we been in such need of the caustic voice of the late Edward
Said. Settlements - Jewish colonies for Jews, and Jews only, on Arab land
- were not, of course, discussed yesterday. Nor was East Jerusalem. Nor
was the "right of return" of 1948 refugees. These are the "unrealistic
dreams" that were referred to by the Israelis yesterday.
All this will be
discussed "later" - as they were supposed to be in Abbas's hopeless Oslo
agreement. As long as you can postpone the real causes of war, that's OK.
"An end to violence," that has cost 4,000 deaths - it was all said
yesterday, minus the all-important equation that two-thirds of these were
Palestinian lives. Peace, peace, peace. It was like terrorism, terrorism,
terrorism. It was the sort of stuff you could buy off a supermarket shelf.
If only.
At the end of the day
the issues were these. Will the Israelis close down their massive
settlements in the West Bank, including those which surround Jerusalem? No
mention of this yesterday. Will they end the expansion of Jewish
settlements - for Jews, and Jews only, across the Palestinian West Bank?
No mention of this yesterday. Will they allow the Palestinians to have a
capital in Arab East Jerusalem? No mention of this yesterday. Will the
Palestinians truly end their "intifada" - including their murderous
suicide bombings - as a result of these non-existent promises?
Like the Iraqi
elections - which were also held under foreign occupation - the
Israeli-Palestinian talks were historic because they were "historic". US
Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, "warned" Palestinians that they must
"control violence" but there was, as usual, no request to "control" the
violence of the Israeli army.
Because the sine qua
non of the equation was that the Palestinians were guilty. That the
Palestinians were the "violent" party - hence the admonition that the
Palestinians must end "violence" while the Israelis would merely end
"operations". The Palestinians, it seems, are generically violent. The
Israelis generically law-abiding; the latter carry out "operations".
Mahmoud Abbas went along with this nonsense.
It was all too clear
in the reporting of yesterday's events. What was on offer, said CNN, was
"an end to all violence" - as if occupation and illegal colonisation was
not a form of violence. The American Associated Press news agency talked
gutlessly about "towns that, for now, continue to be under Israeli
security control" - in other words, under Israeli occupation, although
they would not tell their readers this.
So Mahmoud Abbas is
going to be the Hamid Karzai of Palestine, his tie the equivalent of
Karzai's green gown, "our" new man in
Palestine,
the "tsunami" that has washed away the contamination of Yasser Arafat,
whose grave Condoleezza Rice managed to avoid. But the tank-traps remain:
East Jerusalem, Jewish settlements and the "right of return" of 1948
Palestinians to the homes they lost.
If we are going to
clap our hands like the Sharm El-Sheikh "peacemakers" yesterday, we'd
better realise that unless we are going to resolve these great issues of
injustice now, this new act of "peacemaking" will prove to be as bloody as
Oslo. Ask Mahmoud Abbas. He was the author of that first fatal agreement.
February 11, 2005
BACK TO TOP ■
COMMENT
© 2004 Bulatlat
■ Alipato Publications Permission is granted to reprint or redistribute this article, provided its author/s and Bulatlat are properly credited and notified. |